This may come as a surprise to some, but I was one of the first subscribers to Organic Gardening & Farming magazine - back in the '50s. How did I spend my summer vacations when I was kid? Raising veggies in my mother's back yard. Walking alone in the woods remains one of my greatest pleasures. But I know "environmentalists" who can't tell a redtail from a peregrine, or a spring beauty from an adder's tongue and who have the gall to preach to me about "greenness." I am thinking of one in particular whose environmentalism is simply one more manifestation of a lifelong preoccupation with self-assertion. If you haven't gone to the trouble of learning the names of the trees and flowers and birds and spend no time looking at them - really looking, not just listening to what some guide tells you about them (and what the hell are you doing in the woods with a guide anyway?) - don't talk to me about the environment. I know nothing about it and care less. I only know beeches and tanagers and marsh mallows - things like that, alive and beautiful.
Hear, hear!
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